Contents

The player controls either a boy or a girl (the game allows to choose at the start) who has to enter the walled city of Antescher (a reference to the artist M. C. Escher) in order to rescue their significant other who has been captured and tied up somewhere in the city. The city is inhabited by giant ants which chase and attempt to bite the player. The player can defend themselves by throwing grenades at the ants. Once the hostage is rescued, the two must escape the city. After this, the whole thing starts again with the hostage located in a different part of the city, with each location being progressively more difficult to reach than the previous.

Almost all of the game code was written by hand on paper using assembler mnemonics, then manually assembled,[1] with the resulting hexadecimal digits typed sequentially into an external EEPROM emulator device (aka SoftROM[2] or "softie") attached to a host Spectrum.[3] Similarly, the character graphics and other custom sprites were all hand-drawn on squared paper and manually converted to strings of hex data. Additionally, some minor add-on routines such as high score registration were added on to the core game using regular Sinclair BASIC.[4]

Ant Attack was well received by gaming press.[5][6] The game was nominated in the 1983 Golden Joystick Awards for Best Original Game of the Year, eventually coming second to Ah Diddums.[7] The ZX Spectrum version was rated number 14 in the Your Sinclair's Official Top 100 Games of All Time.[8]